Your Initial Post is expected to be a prose essay, with a thesis statement and 2-5 paragraphs supporting and explaining the thesis. Remember to base your response on information and analysis from the readings. Cite the information and analysis you provide. Explain what you learned in your own words, and do your best to synthesize the authors’ analyses into your own original analysis; do not rely exclusively on quotations from the readings to make your points.
These questions allow for credible outside readings to count toward your three citations of required readings. So, provided that your sources are credible, three citations from credible outside sources will count as required readings.
Write a thorough and thoughtful essay that answers one of the following questions:
- One of our themes this semester is that before several transformations, people looked to the past in order to make sense of their universe; people lived in a world with little change; people were not particularly optimistic. All of this changed, however, over the course of several centuries. In the readings this semester, where do you see people beginning to look to other sources than an authority from the past; beginning to experience and expect more and more change in their lives; and beginning to expect the future to be better than the present? This question appeared in Week 4. You may gain insight by looking at your own or your classmates’ responses there.
- Compare the strengths and weaknesses of these two worldviews:
- Western, experimental, scientific
- Religious, mythical, or magical
- While most historians believe that neither future casting (predicting what will happen, based on what happened in the past) nor writing “what if?” histories are appropriate approaches to professional historical research, these activities can be useful thought exercises that help us analyze the past from a different perspective and thus help us understand what happened and why in a new way. How do you predict that technology will transform human lives and worldview and over the next century?
- If there is some area of the readings that you have been burning to discuss all semester and have not had the chance, here is your opportunity. You may address any area of the readings that struck you as particularly important or with which you disagreed. Support your assertion of importance or disagreement with evidence.
You may use the following sources but they are not required, you may use outside sources as long as they are credible
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/sputnik-impact-on-america/
https://www.ted.com/talks/john_graham_cumming_the_greatest_machine_that_never_was
https://ethw.org/Oral-History:Jack_Kilby
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/
https://www.ted.com/talks/edward_tenner_unintended_consequences
https://www.stonybrook.edu/globalhistory/PDF/CulturalResourcesforTechnologicalProgress.pdf
